I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.
Here are some of the things you can get banned for:
- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.
- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).
- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.
The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.
There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].
From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...
If this doesn't sound 1984-esque I don't know what does.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.
But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?
The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.
Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
Writing someone was called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.
Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?
Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement
always offended by something
Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.
and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
What does this mean?
Ok, to clarify:
> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...
Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
This is fascinating, thanks for mentioning it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...
While having an "In the news" section on the front page
tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.
Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.